


rolling along, i'm in a strange state of mind

by areunasty



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Control Issues, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disordered Eating, Dissociation, Drug Use, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Self-Harm, elliot alderson has a very bad not good day, the shayla/elliot isn't the main plot point but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 09:12:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10659486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/areunasty/pseuds/areunasty
Summary: Some things are unspeakable. They’re a cyanide capsule between his teeth, and to open his mouth would be to crack it open and let it ooze like tar until he poisons himself.





	rolling along, i'm in a strange state of mind

**Author's Note:**

> tw for self harm, disordered eating, vomit, and non-recreational drug use. 
> 
> shayla is here because she's my girl gone too soon

It happens on the Q, like it always does. The late afternoon rush of people coming from work in Manhattan means too many shoulders pressed against his own, faces and arms and elbows in his space and Elliot feels himself retreat in the crush of bodies to somewhere deeper and safer. He’s so out of it that the sound of the tracks feels like it’s coming from over his head, like his face is about to be pressed to that horrible, tantalising middle track. He closes his eyes, blocks out the bodies around him but it makes the sensory stuff even worse. It’s overwhelming, and he’s racing towards overstimulated faster than the train towards his destination. The shaking of the carriage is lulling him closer to something almost catatonic, and he feels stupid, brainless with it. Sound distorts, like it’s coming at him from down a long tunnel, and he’s breathing fast and hard and faster still, until the train stops and people spill out of the carriage like a live birth. 

It’s been a long day.

Elliot wobbles home to his apartment with a cigarette he forgot to light crushing flat between his fingers. The itch of too many people is well under his skin now, and he’s spaced out and barely-tethered, and he can’t stop thinking about how Angela has been ignoring him at work, how he’s found himself disconnected in places he doesn’t remember more often than usual. He buys McDonalds and eats it faster than he can think, and then that too is sitting in him with the weight of something wrong.

Elliot has honed his pretence of control into something cold and hard but brittle. There are few things that can be controlled when you’re a near constantly dissociated possible-schizo with a drug habit. These things are: food, pain, sex. 

Elliot thumps to his knees in front of the toilet, rucksack thrown to the couch in his beeline for the bathroom. The impact shakes him out of his dissociated catatonia, and he throws off his hoodie and lets it crumple to the dirty tile. His knees hurt. His stomach hurts. He swallows once, twice, and then his fingers are scrabbling at the back of his throat in search of the trigger that’ll set the rest of his day straight.

He squeezes his eyes shut at the involuntary tears, imagines a button behind his uvula emblazoned with ‘control’. His short, bitten to the quick nails scrape at the slick recesses of his throat, and he knows he’ll be feeling this for days. Whenever he smokes, whenever he speaks, swallows, _eats_.

And then his McDonald's comes up and he stops thinking about anything but _breathe_ , and _spit_ , and _more_.

The aftermath is almost post-coital, and Elliot smokes a cigarette that burns his tender throat and thinks blissfully, blessedly, of nothing at all.

\----

“You fuck up your throat?” Shayla asks, and it’s ironic how her low, smoky voice rasps over the words. Elliot smiles, a twitch at the corner of his mouth, humourless.

“No.” He croaks, and Shayla rolls her eyes. 

Some things are unspeakable. They’re a cyanide capsule between his teeth, and to open his mouth would be to crack it open and let it ooze like tar until he poisons himself. He keeps his jaw firmly clenched, and he watches Shayla smoke a joint down to the ends before she curls against his side.

This is how it goes.

He fucks Shayla because she’s there. Because she’s beautiful, because she’s his dealer, because he loves her quilted art and because he loves how she leaves in the morning. The husk of her voice after a blowjob, or a hit, and the way her dark eyes close heavy lidded when he says something to really make her laugh. He loves her in some part of himself that doesn’t often see the light of day, the soft vulnerable core of his being that he keeps hidden under his hoodie and between his hunched shoulders. Shayla is too much and not enough and everything he could ever need and he fucks her when she wants to and she fits his face into the hollow of her throat when he cries. 

He tucks his face down between her legs and licks her out soft and slow, and she tangles her hands in his curls and breathes out, _God, Elliot_ like they love each other. The mix of morphine and his meds makes it hard for him to cum, so Shayla drifts off to sleep next to him while Elliot presses his face into the mattress and lets his mind spit _junkie, stupid fucking junkie_ over and over until he falls into an almost-sleep.

He shivers through vague withdrawals the next morning, having gone too hard the previous night to erase the pain in his throat and the twitch of his fingers for more of it. Shayla’s hand is cool and gentle in the middle of his back, and he twists to ash his cigarette in the ashtray she has resting on her bare stomach. She giggles when he does it, and Elliot just goes back to smoking and picking at a loose thread on the bed sheets.

Shayla’s hand spreads out across the skin of his back, rubs up and down twice, and Elliot feels stupid, lonely tears prick at his eyes. The thread comes away from the sheet. 

“You got a mom?” He asks.

“Sure.” Shayla says, and pulls herself into a sitting position so they’re shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. She places the ashtray on his knee. “Everyone’s got a mom.”

He looks at her then, and she smiles like she’s got nothing to worry about. How can she smile like that? He needs a fucking hit. He needs to go to work. He _needs_.

He kisses her, because she told him not to ask anymore, and the morning slips away.

\------

The series of events that lead to Elliot hacking open an old, stolen sharpener with his Swiss army knife and mostly his hands are vague, blurry. His knees are hurting from the way he’s kneeling on the hard lino of the floor, the red ridges where plastic had been driven into his palms burning. 

It went something like: Ollie speaking to him, Gideon snapping at him, Angela’s pitying face and Shayla getting hit by her dickhead dealer. Or maybe it was the crush of the Q, the cold curl in his stomach as withdrawal shuddered through him, the empty bottle of Suboxone sitting next to Qwerty, who didn’t deserve to see all this. 

Maybe it was the stress of planning to bring down a major conglomerate on his already brittle mental state. Maybe it was all of it.

The blade comes loose in his hand and he rises from the floor without much thought to what he’s going to do with it. Movement is mechanic and involuntary when he gets to this point. The cyanide capsule creaks under his molars, a constant reminder. 

The ugly dark pile of black plastic on the off-white lino is malignant, an omen. Elliot watches it from his perch on the bed, running his thumb along the blunt side of the blade as his mind ticks over. Morphine makes sight and sound distorted, like everything is coming at him through a thick pane of glass. Time creeps slow, barely real, and Elliot imagines tearing skin from bone just to see what’s really inside him. He feels dreamy and very far away, like whatever he may do tonight might not be there in the morning anyway. 

Sometime in the immeasurable future, long after his sense of time has been lost, he cuts himself, and he cries, and he sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
